Twitterhea- aka Twitter Diarrhea

Twitterhea or Twitter Diarrhea sucks. Unlike real diarrhea it mostly sucks for the followers but it also sucks for the people afflicted with it. If you use twitter you’ve probably experienced this at some point. It’s the point in time when some user decides i have really important things to say and i’m going to say them all RIGHT NOW.

I did a search on this topic and i’m certainly not the first person to write about this issue. However what they were talking about was mostly in regards to minutia. As in no one wants two tweets expressing the fact that 1) you just put the pickle on your sandwich and 2) you’re eating your sandwich. One would be sufficient if either.

However as obvious as it is that no one cares about your minutia it’s much less obvious to consider whether the volume of what you’re writing is too much even if it’s extremely useful.

We’re all busy people with real jobs and things to do. Twitter is a useful learning tool and we love when people share things that are interesting/informative/funny etc. Yet no matter how interesting/informative/funny the things you’re sharing are if i see a tweet from you every few minutes i’m going to assume what you’re sharing is just a list of things and none are all that important.

In fact the volume of minutia can be much greater then the links you share because at least something like having a sandwich i can view and move on from. When I see a link i have to decide whether its interesting enough to click and to repeat what i said above if i see alot of tweets at once i’ll assume they’re not that interesting.

In other words by tweeting too much no matter how valuable your tweets are you’ve devalued all your tweets.

I won’t put a number on what’s too much it probably varies for different people. So when you’re tweeting just remember to tweet wisely.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 9:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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The constant issue between how much to tweet per day. In essence, I look at this entirely differently, since when I am Twitter during the day: I try to do the following: @ anyone who has followed me, publically thank any one who has RTD, post relevant links that my network wants to see, engage as many friends I have here in public convos, and if the game is on, forget it, we tweetcast.

For my account, I don’t worry about the people who unfollow me, I worry about the people who follow me and when they tell me I should tweet even more, I do.

There is no right way to do this, but everyone will find success if they just be themselves on Twitter and don’t overthink it.

Thanks for the comment Julio. As with any form of communication in life a lot of what you’re going to be doing depends on who your audience is. If they desire/tolerate a lot tweets then great go for it.

You do have to understand though that if you’re tweeting about every play during a football (or futbol) game and you have people following you as a social media resource they probably won’t be appreciating all those football tweets filling up their timeline.

If your goal is to be known as a social media person (as only one example of something you could be known for) that’s a problem for you. If it isn’t your goal then you don’t need to worry about it.